Thursday, November 19, 2015

Time to let this flesh hound out of the bag: I'm building a Kings of War army. Without having played a single game, nor watched it live! There are reasons - KoW has points + clearly defined list building rules, as well as a very liberal approach to choice of models; gameplay is familiar from WHFB, particularly the combination of blocks + dice - but we can gloss over those for now.

While I could use my Skaven as Ratkin in a heartbeat (and I'll likely return to them), and I've already whipped up some lists to get my Tizz Daemons on the table as extremely shooty Abyssals, it's easier to find hobby time than game time, and I do like building armies. You know what else I like? The new AoS Khorne dudes ...

Packs of frothing loonies with some dudes to keep them in line, juice them up and/or kill stuff themselves. Maybe horrible, plus points may shift a bit when Uncharted Empires lands next week. Ignoring both of those inconveniences, I have the list planned out to 2000, and am excite.

At this point, I've summoned about 1200 points of Bloodbound ...

... scrounged up all the square bases needed for this first round, ordered fancy steel trays from Shogun Miniatures, and got the Chieftain and Skald cleaned and assembled:

Both need their gaps filled, and you'll notice Korgath is missing a shin! A packing mishap that is being rectified. Korgs has also lost his obnoxious KHORNE back banner - I feel like he's inspiring enough as is! I'll round out the characters with a converted bloodletter for the Magus. Because blood magicks don't count o_O

Early days yet. Moving apartments next week, so we'll see how much mold line scrapping I can get done in that time.

Monday, November 16, 2015

Stunningly, as well as a little sadly from this side of
Age of Sigmar, nearly all of that game time was spent with WHFB 8E. There was a
little 7E before the new edition hit in the Summer of 2010, and I may have
messed about with other game systems here and there (I think I played two 1000
point matches of 40k), but my hobby time for the last 5+ years overwhelmingly
went to the final edition of Fantasy. And it was great.

In five years I built, painted and ran three armies through various
tournaments:

Tribe Far Crag Ogres (Updated 6E Army) – Though significantly
improved by 8E’s changes to Monstrous Infantry and Psychology (that BSB
reroll), I never really wanted to do the work to get my Ogres up to full 8E
strength. They continued to be a fun army at 2000 or less, but were too
top-heavy at 2500 without painting more ironguts or going full on deathstar,
neither of which I totally committed to. Still love the big pale dudes, and
they kick serious face in AoS (maybe too much!)

Nurgley Skaven (Updated 7E Army) – The army that I ground
through 8E, taking it to multiple tournaments and always ending up about dead
in the middle of the pack. I eschewed the OTT Skaven builds (which often feel
like the only ones you ever saw) for a more combat-oriented, often MSU-ish
approach (spoiler: Skaven are a shooty, magicky, horde army). Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t, but there was always a lot
of dice thrown and a lot of mayhem, one way or another. The picture here is
from the last Crossroads GT the Skaven went to, when I rolled out the Verminlord
for one more ride. Again, didn’t do great, but had fun. The green things went
into semi-retirement afterwards, as I was sick of dealing with their short
comings … and was working on newer, more actually daemonic things.

Daemons of Tzeentch (Late 8E) – Growing up playing
Warhammer, this was the army I always wanted to make, but couldn’t afford
because of metal horrors, plus Tizz daemons were far too powerful for me in 7E
anyway. Come plastic horrors and a much toned down power level and I was in! It
also gave me an outlet for all those lovely 1988 Chaos sculpts I'd been amassing, especially my
favorite Chaos Renegades skulking about and posing as heralds and champs.

Because Chaos! From build to paint, this army took me almost
two years to complete, and wouldn’t have made it without a club escalation
league and the Spring 2015 Crossroads GT to spur me along. Certainly a labor of
love; my only lament is that while I wanted a weaker army, the late game 8E
meta is/was brutally tilted against this list, thanks to Light magic, cannons,
deathstars, 1+ armor and so on. So though I wanted a softball army that
required work and luck to win, what I got in tournaments was being heavily countered
time after time. It’s a bummer feeling like you have half a chance at best. But I
hear Tizz daemons are rather bonkers in AoS??

Over the years I’ve written dozens of battle reports covering
the exploits of these armies, which you can find on Dakka here.
You’ll also find a few Warriors of Tzeentch 8E games in there, but that was
really my late 7E army. WoC became pretty boring to me in 8E, and that army was
sold off before it ever got painted.

Looking back, WHFB 8E was easily my favorite edition (I
started at the tail end of 4E when I was 11), measured however you like: models
painted, games played, reports written, tournaments attended, etc. It’s not a
perfect rules set – I admittedly phoned it in for a year in the middle,
focusing on the tighter tactical play of WarmaHordes out of disgust for the Yahtzeehammer
side of Fantasy – and my biggest issues were probably 1) the meta and 2) the magic
system (‘IF FTW’ is pretty lame), but I came to embrace the random factor and
the mass carnage. Neither of those things are really offered by all these
skirmish games that have ‘replaced’ WHFB, and I legitimately like rolling dice. (KoW may be the answer. More on that to come.)

While I largely ignored the End Times – I don’t really
care much for Fantasy’s fluff, and it all seemed too ridiculous, too fast to
take seriously – it became pretty clear that something big and potentially
painful was happening to Fantasy. I was less upset than the average square
baser when AoS extinguished WHFB in comet-like fashion … because I’d been in
mourning for almost six months at that point. YMMV. Although whatever you think
about AoS, I think one of the local AoS players summed it up well: one of
the worst things that GeeDub could have done was release a new, fantasy-based
skirmish game during the death throes of an old, beloved fantasy system.

I keep circling around Age of Sigmar, so: what do I think
of the new kid? He’s ok. AoS is fun, simple, fast, and easy to model for. I’ve
played a handful of games – most of which you can read about on Dakka above –
and enjoyed them all. I have a big box of orcs I’d like to someday build up for
playing AoS on the road, though they’re pretty heavily backburnered at this
point, because, to paraphrase a reply on BoLS or Blood of Kittens or somewhere, AoS is a fun enough game but not rich enough to be a hobby. Hobbies live with us, beyond the table and the workbench,
we think about them, strategize around them, scheme up lists and possibilities
and future purchases and make plans around them. I’ve done that for decades
with Fantasy and 40k; I can’t do that with AoS. A lot of the problem is the
lack of a points system – I’ve never played an uncomped game of AoS, and I can’t
see why I would – coupled with not having any of my club to play the game with.

So I suppose I’ll stick to rolling out my ogres for AoS events that fall on weekends I'm not busy? Where I
know I can get 3+ games in in a day, and who knows, I haven’t played many scenarios, which
people say give the game some depth. Admittedly, I also miss battle reporting, which
isn’t the same with AoS, particularly not my written style (though all the
flair on the warscrolls adds some descriptive flourish in a pinch).

Instead of GW, in the hobby time I can scrounge up, I’ve been focusing
on Malifaux along with most of my club (Ten Thunders for me, focusing on McCabe), and really
enjoying it, though it almost hurts my brain it’s so complicated. So you can
expect to see some of that on here. And I’m also diving into Kings of War, a
system which I’ve found little interest in up until very recently, when I
discovered the online army builder. I’ve been scheming up tons of lists
Warhams-style, and will be shoving off on a Varangur 1000+ point force of
Khorne nutballs over the next few months. Haven’t played the game and won’t
until the first 1000 is built and primed, but you’ll hear all about that here
as well. I’d be lying if I said some WHFB 8+ wasn’t a possibility as well, so
stay tuned, and thanks for reading that wall of text!

PS: If you're here for 40k content, it's unlikely to happen, beyond very random sci-fi modeling. The game has left me and my CSM behind - but you can be damned sure we'll be back once Age of Horus hits XD